Media Capital

With a unique focus on corporate headquarters as embodiments of the values of the press and as signposts for understanding media culture, Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City demonstrates the mutually supporting relationship between the media and urban space. Aurora Wallace considers how architecture contributed to the power of the press, the nature of the reading public, the commercialization of media, and corporate branding in the media industry. Tracing the rise and concentration of the media industry in New York City from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Wallace analyzes physical and discursive space, as well as labor, technology, and aesthetics, to understand the entwined development of the mass media and late capitalism._x000B_

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

I am enormously grateful to all those who have helped me think through the
contents of this book and provided support of various kinds along the way.
Faculty and fellow students at McGill University in the Communication
and Architecture Departments were invaluable in the earliest stages of this ...

Introduction

The current round of handwringing over the future of news journalism is
new, perhaps, only in iteration, not in spirit. It continues a long-standing
tradition in the media industry that can be traced back to at least the moral
wars of the 1840s, the critiques of the scandal sheets of the 1870s, the yellow ...

1. News Capital

On its very first day of publication, the New York Sun inserted itself into the landscape of the city by laying bare its location, publisher, and mandate. The paper’s ubiquity on street corners, with its headlines readily visible and accessible to passersby, moved printed material into the realm of the public ...

2. New Buildings and New Spaces

The New-York Tribune’s entrance into the newspaper field in 1841 was auspicious not only for the emergence of the boisterous Horace Greeley onto the scene, but also for the tower that was erected in his honor in 1875, although Greeley himself was not around to see it. Greeley and his Tribune were in ...

3. Nineteenth-Century Stories and Columns

Joseph Pulitzer’s first editorials were infused with rhetoric about the New
World and the Old World. As a Hungarian immigrant, the “New World” to
Pulitzer signaled not only his latest business venture, but also America, and all of the spectacle and publicity that anything “New” could garner. When ...

4. Art Deco News

On April 9, 1921, a wake for the Herald Building at Broadway and 34th
Street featured Evelyn Scotney of the Metropolitan Opera Company singing
“Auld Lang Syne.” The Stanford White structure, modeled after the Loggia
of the Palazzo del Consiglio in Verona and one of the few exceptions ...

5. Postwar News

By 1945, New Yorkers were getting used to taking their papers with double-barreled names—the World-Telegra, Journal America, and Herald Tribune— but they were soon to have difficulty taking them at all. Unlike the two
more famous New York newspaper strikes of December 1958 and December ...

Epilogue

On the eve of the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2008, one
of the largest parties was hosted by the Huffington Post at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. That a website, and not a legacy media company like the Washington Post, held the night’s most high-profile gala struck many in the ...

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